Reply to Have you all read this editorial about Common Core testing?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

Kids are failing year after year now -- just look at Kentucky. That says there are problems with the standards, the teaching and the tests.  
[/quote]

Um... NO!!

First of all Kentucky has long struggled with education.   Their state standards were very low, and for over 20 years they have been struggling with how to raise standards for their students.

[quote]For Kentucky, the standards represented an opportunity to aim again for a long-time goal. Educators had hoped for years to compete with states like Massachusetts and Minnesota, the country’s education elite. [b]Two decades earlier[/b], the state had undertaken an ambitious education overhaul, the Kentucky Education Reform Act, which introduced new standards and assessments. But the reforms failed to catapult the state to the top. [b]Kentucky students continued to be mediocre on national exams[/b]. A report by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank, [b]gave Kentucky’s old math and English standards a D[/b]. Only 11 other states were rated as poorly or worse in both subjects.[/quote]

They started moving to Common Core objectives as soon as they came out, 3 years ago, by gradually switching over, but they didn't start testing until Spring of 2012, the first year of full implementation.   So they haven't had "years and years of testing" to show that the standards don't work.  They have 2 years of testing.  The kids bombed the first year, and improved somewhat the second year, actually.

[quote]The news was only slightly better for Kentucky this year. “Overall, the math and reading scores in grade 3 though 8 and high school did go up, but the concerns we have is that they did not go up fast enough,” Holliday said at a September press conference announcing the new results. Statewide only about 40 percent of students scored at least proficient in math and about 50 percent in reading. 
[/quote]

In my opinion ths reflects the fact that the old standards were simply too low.   It takes a lot of time to get your reading up to speed, if not much has been expected of you in the past.   Especially in high school, kids are going to take a few years to get where they need to be.   One reason Common Core was designed was to improve kids' readiness for college.   To many kids WTH a high school diploma show up at college and need to take remedial classes, for example.   That needs to change.

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/10/what-kentucky-can-teach-the-rest-of-the-us-about-the-common-core/280453/[/quote]

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